A/N: Here we are, Resbang 2017! I want to thank my betas Marsh of Sleep, zxanthe, Silly Twin Stars, makapedia, Professor Maka, and adulterclavis, who kept me going when I was a sad sack and reminded me that the growing is in the doing.
My artists this year absolutely spoiled me this year, and I highly recommend looking at the AO3 version of this story (I'm skadventuretime over there) to see the art embedded and get links to the playlist that accompanies it. Guacamolesoul and kanyewesevans were amazing art partners and they deserve all of the praise. Please look at their hard work linked in my profile! And many thanks to Guac for letting me use their beautiful art as the cover for this work. :')
Warnings for self-harm mentions (no cutting if that's a specific trigger/squick, though), mentions of depression/anxiety, implied past suicidal thoughts, emotional/psychological abuse, panic attacks, and alcohol.
1: I'm calling you from the future to let you know we've made mistakes
Maka stared at three different ramen brands, doing her best to ignore the way the background chatter of the grocery store blended into the insidiously catchy chorus of a song older than she was. Her headache was pounding in time with her pulse, but she shoved it aside to better focus on her current dilemma.
Ramen. Cheap, efficient, and calorie dense, ramen was her meal of choice given the exorbitant prices of other similarly convenient foods. The sale on Top Ramen this week meant that she could get almost twice as many packages as Maruchan, her current favorite, but they only had the very underwhelming shrimp flavor in stock. Sapporo Ichiban was the third contender, and while that brand had the most variety of the three, they were still out of the chicken flavor she craved.
After another five minutes deliberating (and taking into consideration the sad daikon radish and limp scallions in her fridge back home), Maka picked up a twelve-pack of the Maruchan chicken and two of the Top Ramen shrimp before heading to the checkout. She blinked away the spots that twinkled in her vision like mini black holes and went to the shortest line she could find during the Saturday dinner rush.
'Shortest' was relative in such a populated area, though, so she took out her phone to triple-check her to-do list, hunting for small tasks she could finish while standing in line - time misused was time lost, Mama would say. Skimming the elaborate system of boxes and sub-boxes she'd set up in one of her two preferred list-making apps, her eyes settled on a small research task she could complete before the frazzled father ahead of her detached himself from his crying child long enough to pay.
Fellowships were not necessarily a required part of her degree, but everybody knew that students who were able to do them, and do them at respected institutions, were much more likely to get the kind of jobs that led to successful and well-regarded careers.
Besides, it was the only way she could hope to work at Mama's law firm.
She bookmarked a few promising organizations before it was her turn at the till. Once her payment was completed, she ignored the buzz in her pocket that was undoubtedly an automatic 'low balance' alert and strode out of the store towards her Cambridgeport apartment.
Graduate school was not over for her yet, but the phenomenal debt that awaited her already lay heavy on her mind. Going to law school was not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, and Maka was going to make sure she graduated with as little interest accrued as possible. She had taken out only enough loans to cover the portion of her tuition not covered by scholarships, along with some for rent and just a little left over for food and other expenses.
Maka's thrift shop bomber jacket blew open in the warm breeze as she walked along the road towards the apartment she shared with her childhood friend, Harvar. The leaves on the few trees she could see were still more or less green, and she felt a pang of sadness at the delayed onset of what was admittedly a large part of what had drawn her to Harvard in the first place. Being from the deserts of Nevada, the ability to experience both cooler temperatures and an entire suite of seasons was extraordinarily enticing - and not for the first time, she cursed climate change and all of the buffoons who refused to acknowledge it.
She gave the still-green trees near her building a final wistful glance before pulling out a lanyard heavy with discount cards and keys, and neatly flipping to the one for her apartment. Three flights of stairs and a door in desperate need of some WD-40 later, Maka was home.
Her lanyard went right onto the neatly labeled hook by the door, shoes went onto the mat next to her pair of secondhand rainboots, and groceries were immediately stacked on the counter to be sorted and put away. She could hear music coming from Harvar's room, something vaguely electronic with a pulsing beat, so she put extra water in the kettle and pulled out some seaweed snacks from their shared cabinet. Her roommate had some interesting tastes when it came to tea snacks, but apparently the pineapple she loved on pizza was grounds for immediate expulsion from the circles he ran in, so to each their own.
Maka was just putting sachets of green tea in their mugs when the music got louder.
"Yo," Harvar said from the door of his room, reaching up to adjust his gaming goggles so he could squint at her groceries on the counter. "Y'know, I've read this manga before: down-on-her-finances protag lives on cheap food until a former boss becomes her meat-daddy. So on the bright side, you have that to look forward to, and can I just say that I hope you meet him soon because I'm beginning to worry your insides are being slowly preserved."
"Excuse you," Maka sniffed as she handed him his mug and started to put food away. "I don't need a 'meat-daddy'; I'm more than capable of getting enough calories on my own. And besides, I'm not the one who subsists on Doritos and Red Bull." She knew he was right, though - growing up in a house where her father often made her undercooked spaghetti in a drunken haze meant that she learned early on to squirrel away granola bars and bags of dried fruit so she wouldn't go hungry, and therefore never learned how to properly cook for herself.
"You're in law school, little dragonhawk, you should know red herrings are a poor substitute for substantive facts," he replied, taking a delicate sip of tea.
She turned away from trying to shove her ramen up on her admittedly too high shelf to give him a flat stare. "I'm hungry, have a terrible headache, and have used up my last shred of patience on crying children at the supermarket. Keep up the sass, and I'll show you why they won't be able to habeas your corpus."
Harvar rolled his eyes and leaned against the counter. "As much as I'd love to see how far I could push you before you broke out the jiu jitsu, I just wanted to let you know I won't make our How It's Made marathon tonight. My parentals are in town and I wanted to show them around a bit before they take me out to dinner. Obligatory offspring duties and all."
A small, familiar ache began to spread from Maka's chest and down through her stomach, but she shoved it away with something approaching practiced ease. "That sounds nice. Have fun."
Harvar saluted. "Will do. I'll be sure to bring back those crunchy noodles and extra soy sauce packets you like so much."
"No use wasting perfectly good condiments - hey." Maka stopped talking when she noticed him pantomiming along with her. "It's true! You're paying for them already, it'd be foolish to let them go to waste."
"Yeah, yeah." Harvar's phone buzzed and an annoyed, robotic female voice said, "Because I'm a potato." He pulled it out of his pocket to take a look and grimaced as he ducked into his room to turn off his stereo. "They're here, are we still on for the usual Monday?"
"Yeah, I'll meet you in the park outside the public library."
He waved as he headed out the door.
Her tea was warm in her hands while she stared at the empty space he had occupied, groceries forgotten on the countertops. It was still strange to her, seeing people in normal, functional families; what must it be like, to not have guilt or shame or inadequacy snuff out whatever else might be an emotional option?
Shaking her head, she finished putting away her groceries and took out the final package of last month's ramen for dinner. While she heated up some water in a small saucepan, she grabbed her laptop and logged into her school's online portal to download and file her readings for the week; organization was the only tool she had against the inevitable entropy of the universe.
Schoolwork had always been a way for her to calm herself, to quiet the nasty thoughts that liked to remind her of how far she had to go and the precise dimensions of the shoes she had to fill. Doing what she'd been assigned was productive; she was checking boxes, filling in the space between who she was and who she wanted to be.
She had so far to go.
The alarm on her phone informed her that the water should be boiling, so she went over to drop in her noodles and seasoning packet. The headache that never strayed too far was back, and she stirred the noodles more vigorously in the hopes that they'd cook faster so she could have something in her stomach for ibuprofen.
Five excruciating minutes later, Maka sat down with her ramen, water, and pills. The silence of the apartment was oppressive without the usual music or yelling that would come from Harvar's room, and she found herself drumming out an unsteady beat on her textbook to compensate. Funny, how silence can howl.
Any focus she might have had before dinner slid away like water through her fingers, and the more she tried to hold onto it, the tighter her chest became. She lurched out of her seat, gasping, and tried in vain to take a full breath. On numbing feet she walked across the faded carpet to the windows, turned around, crossed the living room and strode down the hall to take in the peeling paint and mysterious ceiling stains, anything to get her mind off of her stuttering breath. Back and forth she went, pacing to jumpstart her lungs and stave off the thoughts that roared roared roared in her head; no, she was okay, she was doing what was expected of her, she was on track to follow in Mama's footsteps and get the recognition and respect that would reflect how well she was raised. Surely that would be good enough.
Those annoying black spots were back, but now they took on a more sinister cast, like they were grains of sand in an hourglass meticulously counting each second she wasted not pursuing her goals.
If she couldn't keep progressing, what was the point?
A new kind of dizziness seized her. She took her water and stumbled to the bathroom to sit by the toilet, nauseous but unwilling to let her body relieve her of any more of her dignity.
The bathroom floor could use a scrub, she noted distantly while she waited out a second wave of nausea. It was added to the mental to-do list along with buying anti-nausea meds, because if this was going to become routine she wanted to be prepared.
After another ten minutes or so, Maka felt well enough to get up and force a few meager spoonfuls of cold soup into her mouth before knocking back some Advil and crawling into bed. The softness of her comforter was soothing, and she lulled herself to the brink of sleep by going over her itinerary for tomorrow.
She would be fine. Everything was under control.
/
This couldn't be happening.
Maka stared at the piece of paper her professor passed around that listed their class rankings after the second exam of the semester, looked at the alien number five next to her name, and finally blinked. This didn't happen. She was Maka Albarn, top of her class, always a hop, skip, and a jump ahead of number two; this didn't happen.
Numb, she passed the sheet on to the classmate next to her, a smarmy looking man with tiny spectacles and a penchant for gelling his hair into strange shapes.
"Ah yes, number one, as expected," he murmured to himself, but loud enough for those in the immediate vicinity to hear.
That broke her out of her spiraling shock and sent a bolt of adrenaline through her system; how dare he think so highly of himself, how dare he assume that he would naturally place so high, how dare -
"Okay everyone, you'll all get a chance to see your grades and rank when the paper gets to you. Until then, we're going to get started," said her administrative law professor, wheeling himself from the podium to the blackboard to begin writing out what he would cover that day.
Maka spent the rest of the class in a strange pseudo-awareness where it felt like she was somehow a two-dimensional creature in a three-dimensional plane, unable to place or categorize all of the information she received. A small part of her urged that something was not right, but most of her was too detached to care.
After class, she drifted out of the room in the general direction of the Cambridge Public Library, because even in her current state she remembered her standing lunch date with Harvar and his boyfriend.
The sun made her squint as she crossed the street towards their usual bench, the noise and very real danger of being hit by a car doing something to bring her back to herself. She was still feeling unmoored, however, when she spotted Kilik opening the lid to a complicated-looking salad.
"Hello, Maka," he said, gesturing with the container to the empty space next to him. "Harv should be here any minute; his stream was running late last night because he hit another follower goal or something."
Maka frowned as she took out her root beer and sandwich. "I thought I heard him rummaging through the fridge when I got up for my five AM run."
Kilik heaved a long-suffering sigh. "He says it's 'part of the job,' but I told him that I'm not a doctor yet and would by no means supply him with medical grade amphetamines anyway." He paused, looking at her more closely. "You seem out of it, is everything okay?"
Maka had simply stopped midway through a bite of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so she took a swig of her soda to hasten things along. "I'm fine. Just tired." The fewer people who knew about her shame, the better. She could fix this, she could regain her proper place at the top of her class before Harvar or Kilik found out she was a failure -
"Earth to Maka, transmission incoming."
She started, eyes struggling to focus on Harvar walking towards her, carrying his heavily-patched messenger bag and looking a little more pale than usual.
"You all right in there?" he asked as he inserted himself between her and Kilik, casually pilfering a stray piece of grilled chicken from Kilik's salad. "I was going to be upset that you guys started without me, but since you clearly need the energy, I'll let it go."
"'Start?'" Kilik quipped, giving him an exaggerated once-over. "Looks like someone didn't bring lunch. Sleep deprivation steal your appetite?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Harvar said, covering a yawn with the back of his hand. "Anyway, it was totally worth it because I went from 20k to 25k subscribers over the course of a few hours. A new record, even for me."
"Well, then I can't wait to be showered in gifts from all that extra income," Kilik said, opening up Harvar's bag to pull out a bottle of sports water and take a sip. "You know I have expensive tastes."
"Yeah, those bath bombs sure cost a pretty penny - uh, Maka? You okay?"
A muscle in her foot had begun to spasm, so she had taken off her boot in a vain attempt to massage it out. "Hm? Oh, yeah, sorry, sometimes my muscles twitch for no reason. It's obnoxious, really, but it seems to go away on its own after some rubbing."
Kilik sat up straighter and frowned at her. "When was the last time you had some water?"
"This morning, I think. But there's water in this soda," Maka said, showing him the ingredients list on her root beer.
"That doesn't count," he said, giving her the same kind of look she'd seen tired parents give their young children. "You need about eleven and a half cups water each day to function optimally, between food and drinking, and soda also has a lot of sugar that prompts your body to use those fluids to process it. You said your muscles were spasming - that sounds like a classic case of electrolyte deficiency to me. Are you getting enough calcium and magnesium?"
"Dude, she lives on ramen and kidney beans, probably not," Harvar said. "D'you think she's deficient in something?"
Kilik fiddled with his fork for a moment. "It's possible," he said at last, pulling out his phone and beginning to type furiously with one hand. "Let me look something up real quick."
"Hello, I'm still here," Maka said, somewhat indignantly, while Harvar leaned over Kilik's shoulder with a worried expression. "And for the record, I take a multivitamin every other day, so I highly doubt I'm deficient in anything besides patience at this extremely personal foray into my daily eating habits."
"Most multivitamins don't include electrolytes, which are very important for nerve function and the lack of which is likely the cause of your muscle spasms. And, well." Kilik looked from the white bread of her sandwich to the root beer wedged between her knees to the small bag of chips she had just opened up. "I know you're trying to be frugal, but you can't afford to skimp on your health. How well you take care of yourself now will influence how your body takes care of itself in the decades to come, and I'd be doing my future profession a disservice by not trying to help." He rummaged around in his backpack for a moment before pulling out a few lime-green packets and summarily thrusting them into her backpack. "Electrolyte packets. These are leftover after my rotation in the pediatric unit, but they should help."
More than a little defensive, Maka clutched her sandwich with one hand and snatched back her backpack with the other. "My mom used to pack this for my lunch every day when I was a child; what do you mean it's not good?"
"Maka, your mother is a lawyer, not a nutritionist," Harvar said, pulling her under his arm so he could pat the side of her face. "If she didn't know good eating habits, she sure as hell wasn't going to pass them on to you."
She stared at her half-eaten sandwich. The healthy eating craze had certainly not missed her; it was hard to be a good citizen and read the morning news every day without seeing at least one headline devoted to some health craze or another. But she had always breezed past those, secure in the knowledge that her mother was an incredible woman who made her diet decisions as judiciously as she made her case arguments.
"I believe you mean the best for me, but I'm still not convinced my mother was in the wrong here," Maka said finally, taking a vicious bite of her sandwich. "I'm going to need to see some evidence."
A slow grin crept across Kilik's face, his dark eyes gleaming in the afternoon sun. "Spoken like a true lawyer. Let's start with whole versus refined grains, and yes, I'll send you an email with the annotated bibliography when I get home."
/
She had opened Pandora's Box.
Maka picked at her bag of chips with the kind of dejected lethargy she had displayed after coming in second for her state's middle school vocabulary competition. Her laptop was open on the table next to her, tab after tab filled with peer-reviewed journal articles providing damning evidence against the kinds of cheap, refined carbs that made up almost her entire diet.
Kilik was right. She was eating garbage.
Next to the tabs detailing precisely how refined carbs affect blood sugar were tabs open to recipes and shopping lists for healthier diets. Maka couldn't look directly at those; the difference in price to what she was used to was enough to give her heart palpitations.
Harvar's door creaked open and he poked his head out, goggles on and his bun looking a little more spiky than usual. "How're you holding up? Kilik said the facts have swayed you."
A long, drawn out groan was all she could muster as she melted onto the coffee table.
"There, there." Harvar walked into the kitchen where Maka could hear him fiddling with the electric kettle. When he came back out a few minutes later, he was holding two steaming mugs of her favorite matcha tea and made a big show of placing one on the coaster closest to her face with an etched triangle symbol he kept calling 'The Triforce.'
"What's going on? The Maka I know sees a problem, makes a plan, and solves things; she doesn't sit there like a lump of chu-jelly and sulk."
She rolled her head to the side so she could fix him with half a glare. "I am trying to make a plan, but all of the options so far are much too expensive to be conscionable. Also, how did you know I spoke to Kilik? Didn't he say he was waiting on his new phone to arrive after that incident with the autopsy practicum?"
"Discord," Harvar said as he sat at the table with her and took off his headset in what she interpreted as a chivalrous gesture.
"How does chaos help you communicate with your boyfriend?" Maka asked, far too overwhelmed with her quarter-life dietary crisis to even begin to fathom what he might mean.
"Discord is like Skype except better in every way – look, that's not the point. He told me you might need a friend right now, so here I am, friend-mode engaged." He took a sip of his tea and waited, damn him to hell, knowing full well that she'd fold after a minute or two.
"It's just." Maka began to rhythmically tap her forehead against the table. "It's just a lot to realize that your entire gastronomical life has been a lie and that you and your mother may be at risk for over five diet-related health issues, and that's not counting cancers."
Harvar nodded without saying a word, and his sympathetic silence egged her on.
"And then there's the issue of time. So many of these recipes require hours of prep time, or cooking time, or marinating time, which in turn requires time to plan ahead and the foresight to ensure that such preparation doesn't conflict with classes or transportation or exercise, and that's not even beginning to get into the opportunity cost of preparing all of this food compared to the value I get from my current study schedule which, mind you, is already packed to the breaking point, and how many multipliers I'm going to need to add to those prep times since I have never really cooked in my whole life and now suddenly need to make three square meals a day -"
"Woah woah woah, calm down there, motormouth. This is why we have the Internet: to make our lives easier. C'mere." He stood and started back to his room, pausing to look pointedly over his shoulder when she remained draped across the coffee table.
So she dragged herself up and followed him, curiosity overtaking the mild panic that had been building from the moment she had opened her mouth - it wasn't every day Harvar let her into his room, and from the vague whispers she heard from mutual friends who knew much more about this sort of thing than she did, he was something of a big deal in the video game streaming world.
His dual monitors glowed on the home screen of a game, what looked like a woman in an angel suit smiling benignly with a metal staff in hand. Harvar walked over to fiddle with something on one monitor and then grab his phone off of the oversized mouse pad that took up over half of his large wooden desk. Maka took the moment to stare at his chair, upholstered in so many stripes and sharp angles it looked like it belonged on a roller coaster ride or maybe in a race car. There was also a mic on his desk suspended from a contraption that reminded her of the Pixar desk lamp, and she had to resist the sudden urge to make it swivel.
"Come on in," he said, taking a seat on his bed and patting the space next to him.
Maka obliged, sitting gingerly on the edge of his dark comforter while he thumbed into his phone.
"Have you been on Instagram before?" he asked, tapping an icon that looked like an old-fashioned camera.
"Um, not really." Her friends had done the Snapchat and Instagram thing back in undergrad, but she'd always preferred to eat her food while it was hot and text her friends a picture when she wanted them to see something.
Harvar smiled indulgently and leaned toward her, phone in hand. "Well, you're about to have your mind blown."
He tilted the screen in her direction so she could see the bright and stylized photos he was scrolling past. "I'm sure you can get the gist of how it works on your own, but Instagram is great because it has whole accounts dedicated to teaching people how to cook, complete with recipes and ingredient lists. More than that, though," he looked at her from the corner of his eye, "they often have videos that show how they cook something, so even if you've never done it before, you can get the right idea."
Maka gazed at his phone, taking in all the colors and the slick editing of the video he had stopped on. "Are those…cupcakes?"
"Hm?" He glanced at his screen and made a curious sound, eyebrows raised. "Looks like it. Man, that filling is kind of pornographic, don't you think?"
Tearing herself away from the glorious mountain of icing and sprinkles before her, she said, "The kinds of things they're cooking look incredibly expensive."
He sighed and got up to check something on his monitor. "You say that, but you seem to have no scruples about sometimes treating yourself to microwaveable and frozen dinners, and I know you know those are more expensive in the long run, She Who Reads Unit Prices."
Maka wilted sideways onto his bed, hiding her pout behind a body-sized plushie in the shape of a ribeye steak.
"Scroll through Buzzfeed Tasty or Goodful for a bit; if nothing jumps out at you, you don't have to download the app. It just breaks my Omnic heart to see you eat questionable ramen every day."
"It is not questionable; it has character," Maka replied, burrowing further into the mountain of plushies at the end of his bed. "Also, what do you mean by 'Omnic?'"
Harvar was already speaking into his headset, something about needing a tank instead of three DPS, but he muted himself long enough to say, "You don't have enough gamer cred for me to be able to explain this before I start streaming."
Maka grabbed the nearest plushie - what looked like a Chinese dumpling with tentacle legs and a beaming smile - and said, "I'm taking one of your children hostage for that."
He narrowed his eyes. "You be nice to Pachimari, you hear."
She gave it a squeeze and almost dropped it when it let out a squeak like a dog toy. "Yeah, yeah, she's safe with me," Maka said as she left Harvar's room, closing the door on her way out so he could do whatever it was streamers did.
Her phone was still on the table back in the living room. She stared at it for a few moments before reaching a cautious hand forward, glaring at her lock screen picture of the Boston Public Library for a few seconds, and unlocking her phone.
Suzume Albarn wouldn't push something to the side without a proper investigation, and neither would Maka.
So Maka typed 'Instagram healthy recipes' into the search bar on her phone's web browser and began to scroll through rows and rows of aesthetically pleasing pictures, periodically tapping on one to take a closer look at the hashtags to see how that changed her search results. It only took ten minutes of browsing for her to grudgingly agree that this could be a useful resource, so she went into the app store with not a small amount of chagrin to begin the downloading process.
She moved to the couch while she waited, setting Pachimari next to her with a small pat so she could curl up against the armrest. Instagram opened in another few moments and prompted her to choose a username, which gave her pause: the last time she'd had to make one was for her Neopets account back in middle school, and there was no way in hell she was going to be known as "bookworm94" at this stage in her life.
Glaring at the screen didn't give her any clever ideas, so she got up to start boiling some water for ramen. Privacy and anonymity were incredibly important to her - as a future lawyer, she didn't want anyone to have anything that could be bent to use against her in a smear campaign one day, and that included being traced back to a social media account as innocuous as Instagram. There was a reason she had a slew of privacy add-ons for web browsers and shared Harvar's VPN.
She selected one of the shrimp packages, deciding to save the more tasty chicken flavor for nights she needed a pick-me-up. While the water boiled, she did some stretches in the hopes it would help her intermittently twitching calves before caving and mixing up one of those electrolyte packets Kilik had shoved into her backpack earlier. Her tongue tasted like fake lemon-lime when she opened the ramen package and slid the noodles neatly into the pot, staring at them like they had personally betrayed her. She discarded the wrapper with a practiced flick of the wrist.
It landed in the garbage backside up, and the shock of the white nutrition label above the barcode caught her eye enough that she glanced at it again and - that was it.
She paused just long enough to grab a new package of chicken ramen before scurrying back to her phone, triumphant: she had a username.
Back on the prompt screen, Maka squinted at the first six digits of the number series beneath the ramen barcode and tapped them in. Instagram accepted the name, and she smiled - 041789 was not something someone could easily connect to her, and as long as she kept the profile picture something neutral or inanimate, no one would know it was her.
A long and creative string of profanity from Harvar's room broke her self-satisfied silence; something must not being going well in his game. Sure enough, a minute or so later Harvar came out with his goggles off and a glare that could cut steel.
"Fuckin' Hanzo mains," he spat, plunking himself into the bean bag chair opposite the couch. "Needed a tank, but 'no man, we have two healers, four dps will work.' You'd think there'd be fewer one-tricks at high elo, but they're a plague every goddamn game."
Maka raised an eyebrow. "You do realize that I don't understand a word of what you just said, right?"
He put his head in his hands.
"There, there," she said. "You'll get them next time."
"Nngh." Harvar raised his head and looked at her. "So, how's Instagram treating you? I assume you did create an account, since you're finally not either scowling or staring into the void."
"Fine, I guess," she said, glancing down at the first post she liked, a looping video that showed the makings of a cupcake bedecked in a gaudy mountain of icing. "Why do you ask?"
"How else are you going to get your first follower?" Harvar fished his phone out of his sweatpants and hovered a thumb over the keypad. "Well? Am I going to have to resort to advanced hacking techniques or are you gonna give it up?"
"We both know you wouldn't dare risk getting put into my triangle choke again," Maka said, her hand tightening around her phone nonetheless. "It's a security risk, and I don't want anyone knowing it's connected to me."
"Have I told you lately how paranoid you are?"
"Verbally or through those sassy little post-it notes you leave on my door?"
Harvar sighed and pocketed his phone. "Fine, be that way. Just remember I can make you Instagram famous whenever you want."
"Sure, whatever that means," Maka said, picking up her much too cold tea and taking a sip. "You gonna be okay in there the rest of the night? Surely your viewers must be willing to give you a break after all those late night streams."
He shrugged. "Eh, it's whatever. They expect that shit all the time, it's always 'Kappa this, MonkS that, you know the deal." At Maka's blank look, he added, "Well, you will know; I'll explain it to you sometime. Oh, and remember to take some small breaks to look at a far wall every hour or so so you don't strain your eyes, might help your headaches."
"Thanks, mom," she said with a warm smile. "And you better not skip out on marathon night this week, it's been ages since I've watched Unwrapped."
"It's a date." He smiled back and made an interlocked loop with both thumbs and forefingers, an old password greeting they'd come up with as kids when it was safe for him to sneak into her room to keep her company while her father had guests.
She returned the gesture and looked back at her phone. It was only eight; she could browse a little more before getting back to school work.
Forgotten, her ramen cooled on the coffee table as she began to scroll through pages of scrumptious looking food.
/
"Dude, did you even go to bed?" Harvar leaned against the wall and squinted at her with the bleary eyes of a man who needed at least four more hours of sleep, his too-large sweatpants revealing a waistband full of fluffy sheep Pokemon.
Maka flicked her eyes up from the twelfth iteration of her grocery list to look at the time, and – shoot, it really was just after seven. As if acknowledging the time broke some sort of spell, she was suddenly made intensely aware of the crick in her neck and how grainy her eyes felt. But it was worth it, worth every hour her body had cried out for sleep, because she had found the most incredible Instagram account.
"Wow. I was not expecting this when I got you into Insta." He walked into the kitchen to futz with the coffeemaker, popping his head around the corner to give her the customary 'Is it okay if I make this exceedingly strong?' head tilt. At her return arched eyebrow of 'Do you really need to ask?,' he saluted and ducked back in to hit the start button on the machine, because of course he would have made it his way regardless.
"So. Tell me all about what got you to blow past your strict ten-thirty bedtime and miss your five AM run," Harvar said when he came back out with two mugs of black coffee and a couple corn muffins that have seen better days. "I'm clearly missing out."
"Well…" Maka took a slow bite of her muffin and gazed at the small bubbles floating along the edge of her coffee. "I was looking in the 'on the table' tag because there seemed to be a lot of pretty and healthy-looking pictures there. I kept clicking on ones by the same account, Vieille Cafetière, so I just went to their page directly, and-" She sighed, swirling her mug and watching the thin tendrils of steam twist towards the ceiling. "Have you ever read something and felt like you got to know the person behind it?"
"Depends, does manga count?"
Maka gave him a half-hearted smack. "I'm serious. I went to their blog's main page from the link in their Instagram profile, and it took me to this beautiful site that had all the recipes from their Insta and more, but also little stories to go with them." She smiled and tapped the side of her mug. "The writing was really heartfelt. It was kind of lonely, kind of wistful, but also full of this warmth, and just - you could tell this person poured something of themselves into these recipes, and I guess that struck a chord with me."
Harvar gave her a curious look. "Sounds like someone's got a crush."
"What? Thisisn't a crush, this is appreciating someone's art!" she said, affronted. "Reading the blogger's stories and anecdotes felt like hanging out with you during a marathon night, is all, and I certainly don't have a crush on you."
"Okay, okay, I'm just glad to hear it's been helpful," he said, dunking a piece of muffin into his mug. "Think you'll be able to kick the ramen habit soon?"
"We'll see," she said as she took a sip of coffee and glanced at her list. "I don't have class today, so I think I'll try my hand at a couple of these recipes, but, well, now I've gone and ruined my perfect sleep schedule." She frowned, then met his eyes. "If you see me napping, please kick me awake."
"Am I allowed to take silly Snapchat-filtered pictures of you first?"
Maka looked at him, unblinking. "I am imagining what it would feel like to slowly decapitate all of your figurines with a bread knife."
"Fine, fine, I'll poke you if I see you snoozing before eight. I'm gearing up for a twenty-four hour stream though, so I won't be leaving my room very often. Good luck with all that cooking." He shoved his goggles back over his eyes and ambled back to his room with coffee and half-eaten muffin in hand.
Maka read through her list one more time to make sure she wasn't forgetting anything before she got up to shove her feet in her boots, grab her lanyard from its hook, and head out the door. There was a Trader Moe's not too far from the apartment that was likely to have the ingredients she needed, and while she had only gone there once when she was looking for some fresher garnish options for a special occasion ramen, it seemed like it had all of the essentials for a better price than the other corner stores in her neighborhood.
A blast of cool air greeted her when she walked through the automatic doors into the produce section, a welcome relief after the suffocating, unseasonable humidity outside. She took out her list - alphabetized by store section, naturally - and began to look for avocados. There were three recipes she wanted to get ingredients for after reading nearly half of Vieille Cafetière: a vegetable stir-fry, a chicken burrito bowl, and a pesto pasta. They all seemed to be easy from a technical standpoint, and all of them included the kinds of ingredients Kilik had not-so-subtly told her she should eat.
She was just grabbing a container of cilantro when something bumped into her from the side.
"Oh, sorry miss," said an employee, judging from his vibrant Hawaiian shirt and plain slacks. "These salad containers are so damn - uh, so darn slippery."
Maka smiled politely and bent to pick up a small clamshell that had slipped from the giant stack in his hands. "It's okay, I got my cilantro just fine," she said, holding up the package.
The man did a small double take, then squinted at it for a moment - he'd probably be someone Harvar would get along with, what with those red contacts - and said, "That's parsley, not cilantro. You can tell because the leaves for parsley are sharper, kind of like spades in a deck of cards, and cilantro's leaves are more rounded, like clubs."
"Oh!" Maka took a closer look at the stiff plastic package and, sure enough, it said 'parsley' near the bottom in neat lettering. "But I got it from the cilantro section."
"Yeah, sometimes people change their minds and put things back in the wrong place." He scowled, clearly offended by this practice. "You should get in the habit of checking everything you grab off the herb shelf."
"Right," Maka said, looking down at the package and chewing her lip. This whole healthy eating thing was already a lot more complicated than picking up a few packages of ramen, beans, and vitamins.
The employee must have picked up on her discomfort because he cleared his throat, brushed back a tendril of snow white hair that had escaped his tidy ponytail, and said, with a strained attempt at a smile, "So, what're you gonna make with the cilantro?"
"I'm trying out a recipe I found online for chicken burrito bowls. I, um." She paused, suddenly self-conscious about the fact that she didn't belong here, in the fresh foods section of a grocery store talking about following the first recipe she'd ever really looked at. "I don't cook much, so it probably won't turn out that well, but.." She trailed off as it hit her that she was maybe getting in a little over her head; after all, she still had three assignments to complete by the end of the day, plus all of her class readings, and that didn't even begin to get into her longer term projects -
"Mind if I take a look?" The employee's words startled her back to the present, a strangely hesitant warmth stirring behind those peculiar eyes. "I cook pretty often and might be able to give you some tips."
"Uh, sure, here." Maka pulled out her phone and swiped into the picture she took of the recipe from one of Vieille Cafetière's Instagram captions. "I'm not sure how good of a recipe it is or anything..."
"Don't worry about that sort of thing, it only matters if you like the way it tastes," he said while he leaned in to look at her phone, and Maka noted that he smelled like those little lavender hand soaps her mother used to bring back from business trips in Europe. "Yeah, I've made this before," he said with a strange little smile. "It's solid, just make sure you go hard with the spices."
His words were oddly validating. Maka put her phone back in her pocket and said, "Thank you, I'll remember that. Have a nice rest of your day."
He waved with a lazy half-smile and went back to stacking salad containers into the cooler.
It was a simple matter to retrieve the rest of the ingredients on her list, and she got back to her apartment more or less in the amount of time she had budgeted for shopping. The increase in her usual grocery costs weren't as staggering as she had feared, but she'd still have to cut out expenses elsewhere to be sure. Looks like those new winter boots would have to wait. And since Harvar was doing his long stream thing, she would have the kitchen all to herself for her first stab at cooking.
Maka put her phone on the counter and queued up the relevant Instagram video from her carefully curated liked posts, taking a few moments to watch the video loop until she felt confident in the general order of things. This particular recipe called for a crockpot to cook the chicken and vegetables, so it wasn't too attention-intensive.
She started in on the marinade and took special care to add the extra lime juice the employee had recommended. She also doubled the cilantro and used heaping teaspoonfuls of spices instead of level ones, and overall felt pretty good about herself when she closed the lid on the marinated, spiced, and vegetable'd chicken breasts. The last task was to prepare some rice to serve it over, but that could wait a few hours until the chicken was almost done.
Before long, a tantalizing, savory smell filled the apartment and made it very hard to focus on the cases she was supposed to be reading. By the time she got up and prepared the rice, she was practically drooling; she'd had no idea that chili powder, cumin, onions, and garlic could make chicken smell this good.
When it was ready, Maka scooped some rice into a bowl, spooned a healthy serving of the shredded chicken and vegetables atop it, and finished it with sliced avocado and some of the leftover juices from the bottom of the crockpot. It smelled too good to let sit any longer, so she grabbed a fork and took a bite.
It was like she'd popped a bubble full of intense flavor on her tongue: the brightness of the lime juice brought out nuances she'd never noticed in chicken, and the subtle heat and earthiness of the spices added a roundness she hadn't experienced before. She took another bite, and then another, until her bowl was empty and her heart felt full in ways it hadn't for a long time.
A lingering smile touched her lips. Maybe this cooking thing wouldn't be so bad, after all.